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Why a Secured Credit Card

Living in Canada means that you now have to start building your credit score and credit strength. In some cases a secured credit card can help you do this. What does this mean? When ever you go to purchase something that requires you to get a loan, such as a car, or house, the lending institution that is considering your loan application will check to see how strong of a credit score you have. There are two credit reporting agencies in Canada; Equifax and Transunion.

For people who have just arrived to Canada, or for students who have finished college or university and are getting out into the working field, they will need to get their first credit card or line of credit. This is important in two ways. The first is that they will now have a source of credit to purchase what they like, and second, as soon as they start buying items and putting charging it to their credit card, those transactions will be reported to Transunion and Equifax. These credit agencies use specially designed algorithmic formulas to determine your credit score and credit strength (worthiness).

The lending agencies such as chartered banks count on these credit scores to make their final decision as to whether approve your loan or not due to how reliable you are with paying back your debts. The higher your credit score, the better it is.

A secondary service that we have at Trusterra Mortgage is to help individuals to build or rebuild their credits by providing them with a secured credit card.

Before we go further in this post and explain to you about what a secured credit card is, we should point out that there are individuals who have been living in Canada for many years and did in fact have credit cards, but for some reason or another, they ran into financial difficulties and throughout time were not able to pay back their loans, or paid them back very late. Because of these discrepancies their credit scores have been reduced greatly and now the major credit card company’s / banks will not approve them for any credit cards until they can show to the bank again that they have a strong an clean track record of being able to pay back their loans on time.

Now, back to what a secured credit card is. Basically it means that you will have to provide a security deposit to the credit card issuer in order for them to approved you on that security deposits amount to be your credit or spending limit. Therefore, if you provide $500.00 as a security deposit onto the credit card, then your credit limit on the card will be $500.00. You can spend up to this amount but you can never go beyond it. Also, if for some unfortunate reason you can not pay back what is outstanding on the card, the credit card issuer already has your security deposit and they have nothing to lose.

The main purpose of getting a secured credit card is so that you can start building credit activity to your name. As you use the credit card in your day to day purchase transactions, your credit score can start to move up and eventually you will be able to go to a major bank and apply for a unsecured credit card. After which point, you can cancel your secured credit card, get your security deposit back and be on your marry way.